(Sorry this is so long – I am in a hurry)
Gpuccio challenged myself and others to come up with examples of dFSCI which were not designed. Not surprisingly the result was that I thought I had produced examples and he thought I hadn’t. At the risk of seeming obsessed with dFSCI I want assess what I (and hopefully others) learned from this exercise.
Lesson 1) dFSCI is not precisely defined.
This is for several reasons. Gpuccio defines dFSCI as:
“Any material object whose arrangement is such that a string of digital values can be read in it according to some code, and for which string of values a conscious observer can objectively define a function, objectively specifying a method to evaluate its presence or absence in any digital string of information, is said to be functionally specified (for that explaicit function).
The complexity (in bits) of the target space (the set of digital strings of the same or similar length that can effectively convey that function according to the definition), divided by the complexity in bits of the search space (the total nuber of strings of that length) is said to be the functional complexity of that string for that function.
Any string that exhibits functional complexity higher than some conventional threshold, that can be defined according to the system we are considering (500 bits is an UPB; 150 bits is, IMO, a reliable Biological Probability Bound, for reasons that I have discussed) is said to exhibit dFSCI. It is required also that no deterministic explanation for that string is known.”
(In some other definitions Gpuccio has also included the condition that the string should not be compressible)
These ambiguities emerged:
Some functions are not acceptable but it is not clear which ones. In particular I believe that functions have to be prespecified(although Gpuccio would dispute this). Also functions which consist of identifying the content of “data strings” (a term which is itself not so clear) are not acceptable because the string in question could have been created by copying the data string.
The phrase “no deterministic explanation for that string is known” is vague. It is not clear in how much detail and how certainly the deterministic processes have to be known. For example, it appears from above the possibility that the string in question might have been copied from the string defining the function by some unknown method is sufficient to count as a known deterministic explanation. This implies that really it is sufficient to be able to conceive of the very vague outlines of a determinist process to remove dFSCI. I think this amounts to another implicit condition: no causal relationship between the function and the string.
Lesson 2) dFSCI is not a property of the string.
It is a relationship between a string, a function and an observer’s knowledge. Therefore, it may be that dFSCI applies for a string for one observer with a certain function but not for another observer with a different function. The rules for deciding which function are not clear.
Lesson 3) The process for establishing the relationship 100% specificity of dFSCI and design is not commonly found outside examples created by people to test the process.
Gpuccio says thisabout the process:
“To assess the dFSCI procedure I have to “imagine” absolutely nothing. I have to assess dFSCI without knowing the origin, and then checking my assessment with the known origin.”
When challenged he was unable to name any instances of this happening outside the context of people creating or selecting strings to test the process as in our discussions. This is important as the dFSCI/design relationship is meant to be an empirical observation about the real world applicable to a broad range of circumstances (so that it can reasonably be extended to life). If it is only observed in the very special circumstances of people making up examples over the internet then the extension to life is not justifiable. To give a medical analogy. It might well be that a blood test for cancer gives 100% specificity for rats in laboratory conditions. This is not sufficient to have any faith in it working for rats in the wild, much less people in the wild. Below I discuss what is special about the examples created by people to test about the process.
A Suggested Simplification for dFSCI
dFSCI says that given an observer and a digital string where:
1) The observer can identify a function for that string
2) The string is complex in the sense that if you just created strings “at random” the chances of it performing the function are negligible
3) The string is not compressible
4) The observer knows of no known deterministic explanation for producing the string
Then in all such cases if the origin eventually becomes known it turns out to include design.
Given the rather lax conditions for “knowing of a deterministic mechanism” that emerged above, surely (2) and (3) are just special cases of (4). If (2) or (3) were present then deterministic mechanisms would be conceivable for creating strings.
So the dFSCI argument could be restated:
Given an observer and a digital string where:
* The observer can identify a function for that string
* The observer cannot conceive of a deterministic explanation for producing the string
Then in all such cases if the origin eventually becomes known it turns out to include design.
Conclusion
There are two main objections to the ID argument:
A) There are deterministic explanations for life.
B) Even if there were no deterministic explanations it would not follow that life was designed
For the purposes of this discussion I will pretend (A) is false and focus on (B)
No one disputes that it is possible to detect design. The objectors to ID just believe that B) true. The correct way of detecting design is to compare a specific design hypothesis with alternatives and assess which is provides the best explanation. This includes assessing the possibility of the designer existing and having the motivation and ability to implement the design. If no specific hypothesis is available then nothing can be inferred.
So is the dFSCI claim above true and if so does it provide a valid alternative way of detecting design?
The trouble is that there is dearth of such situations. One of the reasons for this is that digital strings do not exist in nature above the molecular level. At any other level it is only a human interpretation that imposes a digital structure on analogue phenomena. The characters you are reading on this screen are analogue marks on the screen. It is you that is categorising them into characters. So all such strings are created by human processes. It follows that design is a very plausible explanation for any such string. People were involved in the creation and could easily have designed the string. If you add the conditions that the function must be prespecified and there should be no causal relationship between the function and the string then design is going to be by far the best explanation. It goes further than that. It also means there almost no real situations where someone is confronted with a digital string without knowing quite a bit about its origin – which is presumably why Gpuccio can only point to examples created/selected by bloggers.
What about the molecular level? Here there are digital strings that are not the result of human interpretation. Now human design is massively implausible (except for a few very exceptional cases). The problem now is that carbon chains are the only digital strings with any kind of complexity and these are just the one’s we are trying to evaluate. There are no digital strings at the molecular level with dFSCI except for those involved in life.
So actually the dFSCI argument only applies to a very limited set of circumstances where a Bayesian inference would come to the same conclusion.
Gpuccio 384
That’s a strange inference because it means there is no way of correlating dFSCI with design at the molecular level as we do not know the origin of any strings with dFSCI.
Gpuccio 387
I don’t accept that non-molecular strings with dFSCI are all designed as I think you (subconsciously) adapt the definition of dFSCI to suit the situation. But even if that were true the proper phrasing should be:
Yes – you can choose (b) if you like!
Mung 385
Carbon is the only element with the right electron shell configuration to form long chains (Silicon has it to some extent but not sufficient to form chains like this). Did you not learn this at school?
I don’t see the point of this comment.
Gpuccio
I see you talk a lot of honesty. Do you accept that you don’t know of any instances where the dFSCI design relationship has been demonstrated outside of examples put forward in debates like this? I have asked you several times to provide an example and on every occasion you have failed to do this. Remember that you yourself said that demonstrating this relationship requires the observer not to know the origin.
Gpuccio 395
I want you to describe a single example where the link between dFSIC and design has been confirmed outside the challenges especially prepared for debates such as this. Remembering you have said that such a confirmation requires the observer not to know the origin, to determine dFSCI, then to discover that the origin was design. You say this has happened repeatedly yet you cannot produce a single one. If such an example is described in an academic paper that is fine – refer me to the paper (of course it will not be a paper about dFSCI in life because we don’t know the origin to be designed in that case).
I don’t mean:
I simply one real case that you know of.
Your answer would be something like this:
On such and such an occasion so and so came across this digital string and had no idea where it originated from. He deduced that it had dFSCI because of x, y and z. Later on he found it was designed because ……
This isn’t just a personal need. I think that when you say the relationship has been confirmed again and again you do this on the basis of a few examples created especially for debates plus a feeling that is must be true elsewhere. But in fact outside of these debates the observer does have a shrewd idea of the origin and has to try and imagine they don’t. These debates are a very limited and unrepresentative environment and to extrapolate from them to all cases of dFSCI is poor science. We need examples outside of the debates – tell me about one of them!
Incidentally I think you may have missed this comment of mine.
Gpuccio writes
Gpuccio seems to be saying he can distinguish between a sequence of symbols that are not random from a sequence of randomly generated symbols. Leaving aside the impression that this is yet to be convincingly demonstrated, gpuccio seems to say that he does not need to apply his method to Nature (a biological example, I assume he means) presumably because all life is designed anyway and he doesn’t need to check. I am left wondering what it is that CSI and dFSCI (is that a typo; should it be dFCSI?) can achieve as concepts. Accepting for the sake of argument that there is a universal way (gpuccio’s method) to tell if a string of numbers were either random or non-random, how does this advance ID? What am I missing?
It would seem that the only suggested use for dFSCI would be to distinguish biological sequences that could be the result of incremental evolution form those that could not.
I would like to see a worked out example.
I don’t think Durston will do.
What we need is an example where we know that a sequence did not evolve using some other evidence than gpuccio’s assertion.
This Durston paper published in 2007? I see mung refers me to a Durston paper as well. From the paper:
Have any of theses hopes been realised? The citation list suggests not. Is FSC (Functional Sequence Complexity) catching on? How does this relate to gpuccio’s dFCSI?
I suppose I should simply assert that we know from dozens of lies of independent, consilient evidence, that biological sequences have evolved without the intervention of a designer.
The length of the string and the complexity of it’s function have no bearing on this statement, so I fail to see the point of dFSCI.
Mung:
Don’t conflate boredom with defeat, Mung. The circularity is still there. I just got tired of pointing it out again and again.
Consider a lengthy gene with a known function. The known function means that it’s specified, and the length means that the dFSI is greater than the threshold, so it meets those criteria for the presence of dFSCI.
The circularity is in the remaining criterion:
1. Gpuccio thinks it couldn’t have evolved because it exhibits dFSCI.
2. Why does it exhibit dFSCI? Because gpuccio thinks it couldn’t have evolved (or been produced by any other ‘necessity mechanism’).
Contrast this with irreducible complexity:
1. X couldn’t have evolved because it is irreducibly complex.
2. Why is X irreducibly complex? Because if you remove a part from it, its function ceases.
Irreducible complexity isn’t circular, but it’s wrong. dFSCI is circular, and its circularity renders it useless.
If you excise the circularity from dFSCI, all you’re left with is “has a specified function” and “couldn’t have been produced by pure random variation.” Well, everyone agrees that the gene for hemoglobin, for example, has a specified function and couldn’t have been produced by pure RV. The question isn’t being asked by either side.
The circular part of dFSCI is useless because it is circular, and the part that remains after you cut out the circularity is useless because it answers a question that no one is asking. Therefore the whole concept is useless. Why bother with it?
Now look at what remains of gpuccio’s argument when you cut dFSCI out of it.
Consider a lengthy gene X with a known function:
1. Gpuccio is unaware of a ‘necessity mechanism’ that could have produced X.
2. Therefore X is designed.
Strip out the dFSCI gobbledygook, and you’re left with a pure argument from ignorance: the ‘designer of the gaps’ argument. See why I’m bored?
Perfectly summarized, thank you. I’m going to have to start collecting the comments like this that cut through the bloviation and avoid all the rhetorical ratholes.
Here you’ve demonstrated the general principle that when one strips away the deliberately confusing presentation, IDC arguments turn out to be obvious nonsense, without exception.
Thanks, Patrick.
Meanwhile, poor Mung is completely confused:
No, what I actually said was that the addition of qualifiers can’t save dFSCI from circularity:
Mung:
Of course not. There’s no inconsistency.
Mung,
Read my example above regarding “SuperDuperness”. Note this paragraph:
If you haven’t figured it out, A, B, and C are the qualifiers. You could add a thousand more and it wouldn’t eliminate the circularity. The only way to break the circularity is to eliminate the dependency of “SuperDuperness” on property D. That’s exactly why I disagreed with Mark when he wrote:
My response to Mark matches the logic of the “SuperDuperness” example:
Mung 412
Chains of carbon atoms. I suppose they could be used for long term information storage. So what?
This may explain a lot. What did you learn about chemistry and biology at school?
Thus is a very clear example of a deep error underlying ID. The process didn’t choose Carbon! Carbon came first. It created the process.
I wrote:
gpuccio is not happy:
I’ve cut dFSCI from the argument because it is useless, as I explained above. Your argument can be stated without referring to dFSCI, so why bring in an extraneous and useless concept?
Here’s the argument with dFSCI:
It’s long, it has a known function, and gpuccio is unaware of a necessity mechanism that could have produced it. Therefore it is designed.
Now the same argument without dFSCI:
It’s long, it has a known function, and gpuccio is unaware of a necessity mechanism that could have produced it. Therefore it is designed.
The two arguments are logically identical. The only difference is that the first one unnecessarily mentions dFSCI.
Gpuccio 425
It is cheeky to challenge what is presumably your area of expertise but I am sure you are wrong. You must know that sensitivity and specificity should be measured throughout the process – from creating a test in the laboratory through to its use in the field – because the values may change significantly when you get to the field. Here for example is a paper measuring the sensitivity and specificity of HIV Rapid Tests at four non-laboratory locations in Africa. The values varied significantly according to each location. If medical professionals are using sensitivity and specificity figures from the laboratory and applying them to the field without further measurement then they are making a serious procedural error.
A small recap. This arose from the discussion of circularity. If you know the origin then you do have a circularity problem because anything with a non-design origin would not have dFSCI by definition. The only way round it would be to somehow imagine what it would be like if you did not know the origin. To which you responded in comment 349:
To put it another way I am asking for an example of someone assessing/demonstrating the dFSCI procedure as described by you outside the “laboratory” context of debates. Why do you fight so hard? All you have to do is give me one of your thousands of examples.
Yes. I did respond. It was my fault for creating another thread. I thought it was a distinctive new idea but it was not. I will confine all my responses to this new thread from now on.
For me, what gpuccio’s challenge (and UPB’s “semiotic theory) have shown is the essential vapidity of ID.
Any robust theory advanced to underpin “ID science” wold not need all this intensive interrogation of its proponents to find out what the devil they actually mean. It should not require endless semantic arguments. It should be capable of being coherently expressed, and of support by worked examples.
Schoolchildren can easily grasp the essentials of evolutionary theory, if not the finer details, when it is competently taught; and can if they wish refer to the gigantic resource of published material and original research that
underpins it. At that level, ID is a simple assertion without any supporting evidence
Yet if we ask any of the proponents of the various flavours of ID the simplest of questions about what they have said, the most frequent answer is “I didn’t mean that” Asked for clarification, all that comes back is obfuscation.
And after all this time and effort, we are left with the inescapable fact that no-one has ever come up with a broadly applicable, reasonably specific method of detecting design in biology.
Gpuccio,
Once of the strings I gave you was random.
The other was not.
You did not distinguish between them, despite you saying it’s “extremely easy” to do so.
Why not?
Gpuccio has, on occasion, referred to Durston for a completely worked out example of dFSCI. But Durston has no examples for which the history is known to be design. Nor does he know if every element in the sequence is both necessary to function an unmodifiable.
I do not agree with those here who found gpuccio’s inference of Design to be circular. In my exchanges with gpuccio the designation of dFCSI by gpuccio was made after no one happened to have a detailed explanation of how the function arose by RV+NS. As might happen if no one had studied that gene enough.
If later someone came up with such a detailed explanation, then gpuccio declared that this would be a case where the inference from dFCSI to Design would have failed — a false positive that would refute the method. But gpuccio argued that this had not happened ever.
I don’t see circularity there — gpuccio says that if an explanation of the string from a “deterministic” mechanism is found later, the determination of dFCSI is not then changed. I think people have been assuming that gpuccio needed to have RV+NS ruled out to declare dFSCI to be present. Not so, according to gpuccio.
(Although I think that this procedure is not circular, I do not see how to apply it if one’s name is not gpuccio. It has not been explained well enough to me.)
Joe,
Gpuccio states that dFSCI is both observer-dependent and time-dependent.
Time dependence:
Observer dependence:
As I commented at the time:
I agree that gpuccio is using dFSCI to argue that sequences could not have evolved.
He has admitted that functions that arise in one or two steps, as with Lenski, can evolve. It is the quantity of information or the length of the string that suggest it could not have evolved.
Gpuccio’s problem is that the length of the sequence is irrelevant if it accumulates.
But having admitted that one or two step accumulations are naturalistically possible, the only claim he is making is that longer accumulations do not happen. He bases this on the length rather than any evidence of an alternative history.
seems Gpuccio is doing the equivalent of claiming that pennies do not add up into dollars.
The only way that works is if cumulative change is impossible.
It’s as if Newton had argued that planetary motions cannot be explained by the force governing the trajectory of cannonballs.
In discussion with me, gpuccio argues that dFCSI is assessed based on information available at that time, but that the assessment does not change afterwards if more information is found. And that there are no cases known where the sequence is declared to have dFCSI so that it is due to Design
but turns out later to have natural mechanisms of RV+NS responsible for it.
gpuccio does not allow us to use sequences evolved in a genetic algorithm as test cases, and sequences made up by discussants here don’t seem to working as test cases. gpuccio wants to know exactly how they were made as part of the dFCSI assessment.
So we’re left with biological sequences. dFCSI is assessed based on what we know right now, gpuccio then argues that the ones whose natural history is unknown will not later turn out to arise by RV+NS. But testing that would take lots of time.
petrushka missed a bet by saying …
It’s as if Newton had argued that planetary motions cannot be explained by the force governing the trajectory of cannonballs.
when petrushka obviously should have said “the force governing a falling apple”.
Re apples and cannonballs:
I was trying to use Newton’s published arguments rather than mythology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_cannonball
I think we can safely say that in Newton’s time, every case of an object orbiting another object rather than falling into it — without exception — required continuous intelligent intervention. This would be obvious to any five year old.
Gpuccio:
To say that “X exhibits dFSCIgpuccio” is just to say that 1) it has a specified function, 2) it can’t be explained by pure RV, and 3) gpuccio isn’t aware of a ‘necessity mechanism’ that can produce it.
In actual contentious cases, like the case of the hemoglobin gene, we already know that there is a function and that it can’t be explained by RV. The only novel information conveyed by the statement “this gene exhibits dFSCIgpuccio” is that “gpuccio isn’t aware of a ‘necessity mechanism’ that could produce this gene.”
So when you speak of dFSCI being an empirically reliable indicator of design, all you’re saying is this: ‘Whenever gpuccio has looked at a sequence and decided that it cannot be accounted for by a ‘necessity mechanism’, that sequence has turned out to be designed (if its origin can be determined at all).’
In other words, the argument boils down to ‘if gpuccio isn’t aware of a ‘necessity mechanism’, then infer design.’
It’s exactly as I said earlier:
It’s a pure argument from ignorance. dFSCI’s only role is to obscure this fact and to impart a pseudo-scientific sheen to the argument.
(Just to be clear, I’m not accusing gpuccio of dishonesty here. I think he genuinely believes what he is saying, but that he just doesn’t realize that once you’ve subtracted the trivial part and the circular part from his argument, what’s left is nothing more than an argument from ignorance.)
But that in itself is Dembski’s “oracle”.
Imagine string X with a length of 500 bits.
Its “function” is trigger a sale of a set of stocks when an appropriate dollar value is reached.
Just the “function” description tells you it was designed as I’ve never seen a stock market pop up in the middle of a forest due to nature.
Dispense with the “oracle” and determine “dFSCI”.
I’ll give you two strings, X and Y, whose “function” is to provide a value to load into a D/A converter.
How would you even go about determining which string of values were designed and which weren’t?
“dFSCI” won’t help as both strings have exactly the same “function” and “complexity”.
If I tell you any more, I’ve essentially told you whether or not one was designed.
keiths:
keiths:
Mung:
ID : abstract thinking :: oil : water
Gpuccio – 432 and 433
I am not playing games when I ask for examples of you verifying the dFSCI/design relationship outside the debate context. I think it is important for two reasons:
1) You want to draw an analogy between dFSCI and medical diagnosis testing. I don’t think that analogy holds. But if it does then certain standards apply. In a debate context some important factors are present which are not present elsewhere and therefore measurements of specificity and sensitivity done in a debate context cannot be extrapolated elsewhere.
What are these factors? I am not sure I have identified all of them but they include:
* It is well defined how to do the complexity calculation. The space of all possible strings is clear and a uniform probability distribution of each possible string is assumed.
* The participants are selecting examples with an agenda. So you and Mung are presenting examples which are clearly designed and clearly meet your criteria for dFSCI. We try to present more difficult ones, and indeed you can’t tell whether they are designed, but then you dispute whether they have dFSCI on grounds such as unacceptable natural processes (no GA algorithms), or unacceptable functions (no post-specified lists, no “data” strings).
* It is possible to arrange things so the observer has an unrealistic lack of knowledge about context and origins (although it is quite hard to do this).
So really if the case is to be convincing then there should be examples of the dFSCI/design relationship outside the debate context. This can still be controlled, just as assessing diagnostic tests in a hospital can be controlled. In fact I am asking that the examples conform to the control standards you yourself set i.e. an observer who had no knowledge of the origin deduced dFSCI and then later found the string was designed.
2) This sounds a bit pompous but I want to be reassured about your ability to be self-critical, as I suggest Joe and I have been over the issue of circularity. The ability to look at your own ideas critically and accept you are wrong is rare. I do not expect any of your colleagues to do it. But I hoped you might be an exception. If the participants are not prepared to be self-critical then debates are bound to become sterile as no one can change their opinion.
It seems to me obvious now that you have never observed an example of the dFSCI relationship being confirmed outside the debate context. I have asked for a single example many, many times and even given you the form of words such an example would take. You are honest so you haven’t made one up, but you also haven’t provided the example. Instead you have raised almost every objection I can imagine. I think this must be because it would be embarrassing for you to confess that despite your claim that the principle has been verified thousand and thousands of times you actually have never observed it being verified outside the debate context.
Obviously you can now go and make up an example with your brother but this would share the characteristics of a debate context and would not count as self-criticism.
Mung 435
No. This wouldn’t meet Gpuccio’s criteria for a test of the dFCSI. The authorities know a lot about its origin before they even begin the tracing operation – in particular they know it was designed.
Gpuccio 433
I guess I should also address the examples you set me. I went along with them but to be honest I don’t understand the point. I have never disputed that you can design examples in this debate environment which meet your criteria for passing the dFSCI test (although in this case I think you failed – see below). The interesting questions are:
* Are there examples which meet your criteria for dFSCI which are not designed?
* Are there any cases outside the debate environment (see my earlier comment) which meet your criteria for passing the dFSCI test at all?
As it happens the first example does throw some light on some of the problems with dFSCI and the debate environment. Of course I can see that it was based on some English text which someone wrote and therefore it was designed. I can do this on good Bayesian grounds. But does it meet your criteria for passing the dFSCI test?
The biggest problem is the clause that says the observer must have no knowledge of the origin. While I was not previously aware of that particular bit of text (perhaps you wrote it) I am familiar with English text in general, I have a pretty good idea of how it gets created, and I know that you provided the text and are very capable of writing it yourself or finding a piece that someone else created. So I really have a very good idea of the origin – which is why I can deduce it is designed on Bayesian grounds.
This is not trivial. It explains why you cannot find examples of strings which pass the dFSCI test outside the debate environment. Almost every string (except molecular strings) comes with a context that tells the observer a lot about its origin. In the debate environment it is possible with a great deal of effort to devise strings which have very little context and tell the observer very little about their origin, but I am not convinced it happens anywhere else (although even in the debate environment the fact that a debater with an agenda created or selected the string tells you something about the origin).
Of course, we could always test dFSCI by trying to imagine we didn’t know anything about the origin. But you yourself ruled that out – probably wisely as it is very hard to do that objectively.
Yes, viruses in computers. Necessarily computer progarms, necessarily designed. In the wild, however … ?
A strain of Staphylococcus Aureus is discovered that is resistant to Methiciliin. It is dubbed MRSA for short. It causes serious post-operative complications in humans. By painstaking phylogenetic analysis (the Common Descent *** that many ID-ers deny outright, when applied at any other level) it is traced to pigs. Pigs that are fed low levels of dietary antibiotic for purely economic reasons. Levels that, through Natural Selection ***, cause differential survival of resistant strains.
So, is the methicillin resistance genetic structure designed? If you were presented with a resistant and a non-resistant sequence, would you be able to distinguish their dFSCI? A ‘necessity mechanism’, selection, has caused a strain to arise that might almost have been designed for the purpose – and yet it is much more likely that it arose as an unintended consequence of something else.
Suppose an evil designer had created MRSA in a lab and fed it to the pigs. Is there a method that could distinguish that intent from ‘accident’?
*** Very small-scale evolution: “It’s still Staph aureus”. And let’s start a bunfight over the irrelevance of whether it is ‘Natural’, or whether there is any “Selection” going on!
I find it telling that one of the countries that had yet to wake up and ban this ridiculous practice outright is the good old US of A. A country with a substantial and vocal minority dedicated to denial that common descent and ‘natural’ selection are real phenomena. Their determination to avoid its implications at higher taxonomic levels, IMO, leads to willful blindness of its operation in lower. The methods – GAs, phylogenetic tree-building, Lenski et al – that are so vigorously denied, would be better understood. Here endeth today’s lesson.
If such a detailed explanation were determined, per gpuccio’s definition, it would cease to have dFSCI. It wouldn’t be a false positive! Rather, the new knowledge would change our evaluation of dFSCI.
No, gpuccio declares that gpuccio would not do that — that once dFCSI is inferred, further clarification of the origins of the string does not cause dFCSI to be undeclared. If gpuccio did what you say, then the charge of circularity in the Design inference would be correct.
But gpuccio declares that once a string is inferred to have dFCSI, if sufficiently strong evidence that it arose by RV+NS is found, then it is constitutes a false positive. And owing to that, gpuccio’s procedure is not circular. And in that case gpuccio”s inference of Design totally collapses. But gpuccio argues that this has never occurred — that no false positives have occurred.
It seems to me that circularity can be avoided if we acknowledge that the origin or explanation of dFSCI remains unknown.
It is when we use unknownness as a defining attribute of dFSCI, and then declare that because we have dFSCI we know the origin, that we run into trouble.
This is the same problem that pervades the Semiotic theory. We declare that all known instances of X are designed; therefore, object Y, which shares some attributes with X, is designed.
Where objects in the class X are of human origin, and objects of the class Y are of unknown origin.
Of course, we place objects in class X because we can observe them being made, and we know a lot about the maker’s motives and capabilities.
The only thing we know about Y is that we have observed instances of Y being incrementally changed. and that if we project the observed rate of change, we find no glaring contradictions with a history of continuous change.
Nice example Alan.
Of course, the way gpuccio limits the class of sequences eligible for the term dFSCI, no false positives will never occur. One cannot model a process that creates sequences in order to demonstrate the mathematical feasibility, because that would violate gpuccio’s definition.
One cannot point to a gradual process for creating dFSCI, because the quantity of change is insufficient.
But suppose we do a little thought experiment. Let’s agree that gpuccio’s definition entails a threshold. Say 150 bits. That implies that 149 bits does not trigger the dFSCI indicator. The number is arbitrary, but gpuccio’s paradigm requires a threshold. Let’s just call it t.
Now suppose that Lenski or someone starts with a sequence of length t-1, and after 20 years, observes a length of t or t+1. Suppose the happens in a natural setting. What happens to the definition of dFSCI?
Hmm. That’s not per the original definition. Never saw gpuccio issue a corrected definition, but perhaps it’s found in the vast errata following his initial statement.
Should be “no deterministic explanation for that string is known” today, by which he means, no cause acceptable to gpuccio.
Is there anything besides evolution that can create functional complexity? If not, then why does he bother with #4?
Mung 450
You told me it was a virus. Viruses are designed. If you mean’t it was a piece of computer code – role unknown – then they don’t know for certain it was designed – but given the contextual knowledge that people create computer code for a purpose and there are very few other mechanisms for creating computer code then its a pretty good bet!
They may not know who wrote it – but they know a lot about the origin. It is just a matter of how much detail.
Because the observers did not assess the virus for dFSCI and because they know an enormous amount about the origin of the string.
It’s gpuccio’s test – not mine! My point is that nothing in real life can pass his test (although examples in debates can come quite close to it by being able to dispense with most of the context). That’s why he can’t name any examples.
Zachriel wrote:
Obviously the ID people think there are ways other than natural selection that real biological systems can come to contain functional complexity. Hence their attempts to show that there are biological cases of functional complexity that cannot be due to natural selection.
Joe Felsenstein:
Zachriel:
Joe,
If gpuccio amended his definition as you describe, then dFSCI is not only useless, it is downright pernicious.
Consider:
1. The circularity is still there. Suppose that gpuccio assesses dFSCI at 12:15 pm today. Then, as I commented earlier:
The only difference is that he now takes a snapshot right at the moment of circularity and preserves the assessment thereafter. In other words, dFSCI latches — heh.
2. dFSCI was already subjective, depending on the knowledge of a given observer at a given time. Now it’s even worse. Two people sitting in the same room at the same time with exactly the same knowledge can disagree on whether X exhibits dFSCI. Suppose that David and Paula are interested in whether X was designed. Yesterday, David assessed X and determined that dFSCI was present. Paula has not yet made her assessment.
Today they meet with their colleague Jill. Jill informs them of an exciting new experimental result demonstrating incontrovertibly that X can be produced by a ‘necessity mechanism.’ Jill asks David and Paula whether X exhibits dFSCI. “Yes, for sure,” says David. “Absolutely not,” says Paula.
Jill is puzzled. “Don’t you think these experimental results are compelling?” she asks David. “Sure,” he replies, “but I assessed dFSCI yesterday, and I’m not allowed to change my answer.”
3. Once you remove the trivial and circular parts, as I explained above, what’s left is an obvious argument from ignorance:
If you add the ‘latching’, then not only is it an argument from ignorance — it’s an argument from past ignorance:
If ‘latching’ is part of the dFSCI definition, then 1) the argument is still circular, 2) it’s hopelessly subjective and causes unnecessary confusion, and 3) it’s an argument from past ignorance that requires people to ignore new evidence after they’ve made a dFSCI assessment. It also doesn’t get us any closer to answering the question “could X have evolved?”
Given all this, who in their right mind would want to use dFSCI?
Religiously motivated obfuscators?
Okay.
Okay. The definition you had provided wasn’t clear, which is why so many people said it was circular. Normally, empirical tests can be repeated as many times as necessary.
In any case, that just loads #4 with the question of evolution. As that seems to be the question at issue, what is the purpose of dFSCI?
Assuming you have proved by some other line of evidence, that evolution did not occur or was not that cause of the sequence, dFSCI tells you how many bits the Designer inserted.
As far as I can tell, there is ample compelling evidence that creationism in all its forms tends to be latching. When evidence itself is defined in terms of how well it supports pre-latched conclusions, what’s to be subsequently ignored anyway?
If (as seems the case) gpuccio is willing to designate a sequence as having dFCSI based on its length, function, and complexity, then his argument does not rule out it arising by natural selection and mutation. If he designates dFCSI based on our not now having evidence for RV+NS, the designation of dFCSI does not inherently rule out that the evidence might be found later.
gpuccio argues that this has never been shown to occur, as an empirical proposition. gpuccio does not seem to have any theorem showing that it inherently cannot occur in the future. So the use of #4 does not rule out finding evidence of a “deterministic mechanism” in the future. The use of dFCSI seems to be that it represents a formal determination that gpuccio has made that he feels that it is extremely unlikely that this sequence will be found in the future to have arisen by RV+NS.
OK, but my reading is that the size of dFSCI or the number of bits contributes to determining that evolution is improbable.
I say this because Gpuccio raises no objection to two or three functional mutations taking place in a few years in a small population.
So if half a dozen characters are not a problem, but 80 characters are a problem, then dFSCI is being used to determine that RMNS is not the cause.
Joe Felsenstein:
That’s right. So before the introduction of dFSCI, we had this argument:
After the introduction of dFSCI, we have:
dFSCI adds absolutely nothing to the argument except for pseudo-scientific razzle-dazzle. It’s a useless concept.